His Christian name and surname were the same, and the fact that he insisted upon their proper use, respectively, made things of ten most unpleasant. His sombre dignity forbade familiarity. If, greatly daring, I said “Hullo, Alexander!” using his Christian name, he would assume a stern and frightening air: “Alexander! If you please,” he would say icily. “Use my right name.” Herein lay, perhaps, the heart of that dark secret which deceived me for so my years, as also the essence of that horror his double masquerade concealed: Whereas, between Alexander and Alexander none knew which was which, he⁠—alone of all the world⁠—he knew! To me, as a little girl, there was something portentous about him always. More than a common man, he was a Personage, a Figure. With the passage of the years my conception of him grew, for his bulk and stature grew at the same time, until, more than man, or personage, or figure, he became almost that emanation of legendary life⁠—a Being. Although the original sharp outline remained, he spread himself out somehow over an immense, dim background, against which that first outline yet held itself fixed in vivid silhouette. I conceive him as both remote and very close, as shadow and substance, an unreality yet dreadfully composed of solid flesh and blood. This confusion in my own mind added enormously to the mystery of his strange existence; but it was the mistake in the use of his name that remained chiefly serious, a crime of untold import, since it was I myself who first⁠—christened him. To call him by a wrong name, therefore, was an insult to his actuality, a careless and unpardonable sacrilege that trifled with the essential nature of his personality. I lived with an uncle, who was also my guardian, and this mystifying double role contributed, no doubt, an element to the birth of Alexander Alexander. Some childhood’s divination dramatised itself perhaps. If so, this earliest creative drama had a prophetic, even a clairvoyant, quality that enabled him to endure until he had fully justified his dark existence. Both Alexander and Alexander persisted through my girlhood. Only at the threshold of womanhood, when I came of age at twenty-one, did the dreadful pair pass hand in hand to their final distressing dissolution. He⁠—Alexander⁠—often came to see my uncle, who, I divined, was a good deal afraid of him⁠—a fact that impressed me painfully. He was tall, dark, angular, and so thin that he always looked cold, even in the sunshine; as though, having left off his flesh, as others leave off their thick underwear, he was forever shivering in his bones. Of those mummied Pharaohs he reminded me. He had the great square jaw, deep eyes, heavy cheekbones, and copious hair those gloomy figures of prodigious personality bear tirelessly with them down the ages. He walked on his toes a little, adding thus to the appearance of his height. He took, too, an immense and swinging stride, with an easy gliding motion that seemed to flow. His extraordinary swiftness of movement made me think of running water. Oh, Alexander⁠—or do I mean Alexander?⁠—how you impressed me when I was about six years old! Which “Alexander”? I don’t quite know, to tell the truth. Years passed before I got even an inkling. The names still flow, like parallel rivers, down and through my consciousness, to lose themselves in the depths of some mysterious dream-ocean where, at length and at last, they become merged, I believe, in one. There were certainly two of them⁠—once. There was Alexander, and there was Alexander. I can swear to it. It was his⁠—Alexander’s copious hair that impressed me vividly at the age of six. It was smoothed down with shiny grease whose faint, but not unpleasant, aroma came into a room before its wearer, and hung about in the air long after he had left. Hair, perfume, grease, all fascinated me. “That’s pomade,” explained my nurse, answering a question and using a strange new word. Then, fearful of some wrong use I might make of the information, she added: “and no business of yours, remember, either.” The queer word seized me; it remained hanging about my mind⁠ ⁠… pomade, pomade. How vividly, with what lasting depth and sharpness these early impressions score the mind of a child, so tenderly receptive. No wonder the psychologists dive after them to explain the irregularities of nerve and memory that emerge in later life. The name Alexander, to begin with, carried me away. It bore me along with it. There was movement in it. Jones, Green, Brown, one syllable names, are stationary and fixed; but “Alexander” had a glide. It was a watery movement; I always connected it with water. It flowed round and through and under me. It bore me easily away with it.